Civilizations have come and gone over the past six thousand years, yet people have survived it all. Mighty empires have risen and flourished then disappeared completely without a trace. From catastrophic natural disasters to war and revolutions to plagues and pestilence, people have lived through it all.
By examining history, we can discover which survival strategies were successful and which were not. Clearly, the prime strategy to survival for humans is cooperation.
One of the key features of these groups is that they are relatively small and intimate. It is an unspoken assumption that because we live in cities and nations, that we are still part of a cooperative system – we are not.
Mutual aid works because members know and trust each other. Under a national government, most citizens neither know, have met, nor trust the people in charge of operating the system.
In a mutual aid group, everyone has an equal say in how the group should be run, what resources are allocated to where, and what activities the group should engage in. Under our current ‘democratic’ form of government, we are given a vote, once every four or more years. However, the reality is these voting rights mean nothing. We are never asked to vote on how much taxes we wish to pay, where the government spends our money, not even such life and death decisions as whether we should go to war.
One would think that because of the tremendous benefit that mutual aid groups can provide to societies that government would encourage and support the formation of such groups, but the opposite is true.
Central governments have from the beginning persecuted and tried to destroy all forms of mutual aid societies.
Monasteries were more often attacked and plundered by government forces than by roving gangs of bandits. Most famous is the looting and destruction of Catholic abbeys by Henry the VIII, but he was by no means the first, nor last, of hundreds of European kings and emperors to prey upon the rich holdings that monastic institutions invariably acquired.
Rural villages were also targeted by their governments. The current theory is that in Western Europe, the Village System died out by a natural death, because the communal possession of the soil was found inconsistent with the modern requirements of agriculture. However, the truth is that nowhere did the village community disappear of its own accord; everywhere, on the contrary, it took the ruling classes several centuries of persistent but not always successful efforts to abolish it and to confiscate the communal lands.
Religious and spiritual communes have always aroused government suspicion and attacked and disbanded them where possible. Even the harmless fraternal brotherhoods and friendly societies were legislated out of existence.
With all the social benefits they provide society, why would a central government want to persecute mutual aid communities?
The answer is that all mutual aid communities are essentially anarchist in ideology.
The power that is concentrated in a government will always and everywhere, attract the worst type of people, the type of people that should never have power, the psychopaths.
Therefore, governments have always been rife with greed and corruption and will eventually destroy itself, either through revolution, or through war.
When psychopaths are running government, their dream is to enslave the rest of humanity. This is why the age of any political structure can be judged by the degree of tyranny it imposes. The longer a ruler has been around, the more tyrannical he becomes. The same holds true for states.
The word Anarchy has received much negative innuendo. This was intentional. Most people believe Anarchists are terrorists, violent, and advocating for destruction and chaos. Police and agent provocateurs routinely dress in black masks and run around smashing windows and setting fires during peaceful protests and the media tells us they are anarchists. Some fools no doubt believe that emulating such violent behaviour likewise makes them anarchists. However, this is the image the government wants you to believe.
Anarchism is in fact merely a political philosophy that advocates self-governed societies with voluntary institutions based on the principles of non-aggression and non-hierarchical free association.
This describes perfectly the structure of tribes, villages, communes and mutual aid societies.
Anarchism holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, or harmful and entails opposing authority or hierarchical organisation in the conduct of human relations, including, but not limited to, the state system.
It is no surprise that governments, states, and the empires have always persecuted institutions that value anarchist ideals.
Those of us currently living in the west are taxed at a rate approaching, if not surpassing, 80 percent. [i] That means for 10 months of the year each of us works for nothing, every penny going to the government.
The difference between our current situation and that of slaves is that slave owners provided food and shelter for their slaves. We are allowed two months to earn enough money to pay for our own food and shelter.
Governments and nations are essentially, and have always been, nothing more than tax farms. These tax farms work best when the cattle have as little choice and say in decision making as possible.
Anarchy and its practical application, the mutual aid community are the antithesis of the current political structure.
Creating a mutual aid community is not only the most effective strategy to survive almost any social and natural disaster; it is also the most effective tool to use against an increasingly tyrannical central government.
In addition, depending on what type of legal entity you plan on creating for your group, there are even ways of reducing the amount of taxes members and their organization will have to pay.
It is because of every government’s fear and loathing of mutual aid communities that I advise, those wishing to form such a group, do so under a false front. Choose a name and charter that cannot be easily defined.
That is why I believe founding a group under the Emergency and Disaster Response moniker to be one of the most effective since, being outwardly non-religious and apolitical it is less likely to cause concern for the authorities, and thus may escape persecution.
Forming a group under the pretext of an arts colony would likewise work in avoiding unwanted government attention.
Remember, each community can be run to provide whatever functions and services the members feel they need, regardless of their organization’s outward image.
A Disaster Response Group could still act as a lending circle, a buying club, a mutual aid fraternity, and even establish an autonomous retreat community. Lending circles, buying clubs, and mutual aid activities could be listed as, training, equipment and group insurance expenses, while a survivalist retreat could be listed as a training and education facility.
This may seem unnecessarily secretive and conspiratorial or even paranoid, but history shows how quickly any government can turn to tyranny with socialist regimes being the worst offenders.
Most western governments are already deeply socialist and approaching Marxist Leninist communism. In every country in history in which communism took hold, they quickly targeted exactly the type of community groups we are seeking to organize.
Without exception, each communist government rounded up artists, writers, school teachers, professors, and the type of people that would be part of a mutual aid association, and simply marched them to the outskirts of town, shot them in the back of the head, and buried them in mass graves by the millions.
Given such a history of undeniable atrocities, it would be naïve and foolish to believe that it can’t happen to us,
in our country, it
already has. There have been numerous incidents were our government sent out
the army and National Guard to shoot peaceful protesters, union workers and
striking miners.
[i] A middle-class taxpayer’s has to pay a 25 percent federal income tax. Then there is the federal Social Security and Medicare payroll tax of 13.3 percent. 5.65 percent of that is removed from the employee’s paycheck, and the remaining 7.65 percent is supposed to be paid by the employer, but in reality, the employee pays the entire 13.3 percent, because the employer’s portion of the tax does not affect the cost of labor so they just pay their employees 7.65 percent less.
And then there are state taxes which averages at 4.82 percent for the middle-class taxpayer, and which brings the total to at the conservative end to 43.12 percent in federal and state taxes. And it’s going higher every year.
First, we take away 43.12 percent for state and federal taxes, then deduct 25% for the embedded taxes, oh and don’t forget sales tax, anywhere between 5 to 15% but let’s average it out to 10%. That brings us to a grand total of 78% of every dollar earned and spent going to taxes.